Time at the table

When considering the options for a forthcoming dinner in York, the frontrunner was the highly-rated small plates restaurant Skosh, which a friend has been perennially pushing me towards on my previous visits to the historical city. ??

Alas, I have yet again decided to forego it and instead will be making a first visit to Legacy in The Grand hotel. On previous trips, Skosh has been skipped in favour of Tommy Banks’ Roots Restaurant and The Bow Room Restaurant at Grays Court Hotel. Apologies to the guys at Skosh. I promise it’s a priority next time I’m in York.?

I know it might be increasingly unfashionable, but I’ve selected these other places above Skosh primarily because they offer lengthy tasting menus. This is not because of a particular taste for this style of dining, because in many ways, they overtake the whole occasion with constant server interruptions. The reason is because they buy me that most valuable commodity – time.?

Such menus ensure that when dining with my mother, we can – without any pressure to leave the table and being harried to finish up – stay for at least three hours. Some places such as Ynshir in Wales take things even further, with a 30-course marathon that requires five hours. Clearly these places don’t come cheap, but the way things are going, the dining out experience at all levels will be increasingly around customers paying for their time at the table.

I have no real idea how long Skosh would have allowed me to keep my table (it’s not stipulated), but I recognise from its small plates menu, the style of the venue and the competitive pricing that I would not be buying into its model if I thought I could stretch things out and keep my table for three-plus hours on a busy Friday evening. The place would no doubt go bankrupt accommodating such demands, and I understand this.?

?With the increased costs involved in running restaurants and other hospitality businesses, the calculation of how much time a table can be given to customers will be a primary consideration for a growing number of establishments. Well regarded seafood restaurant Orasay in west London has experienced costs having more than doubled across the board, and has therefore switched its whole model.

Owner/chef Jackson Boxer has moved it from two people typically ordering eight or nine small sharing plates and spending three hours for a bill of ￡60 per head. The new regime, named Dove, is based on a two-course model with a lower spend of ￡50 per head, but the key is that diners stay for 90 minutes so customer throughput can be boosted. A simple calculation shows Dove has increased revenue per minute for each diner from 33p to 55p.?

I’ve reported in a previous column that such a sales-per-seat-type metric was adopted by renowned Chicago restaurant Alinea and its sister outlets, with its former owner using the data from the booking system Tock that he’d created. This was overlaid with point-of-sale data to enable the viewing of this metric by the hour and day of the week. Rather than enforcing rigid table time allocations, the system highlighted whether tables should be turned more quickly at certain times of the week or if the focus should be on temping customers to increase their spending. ?

A recognition by both operators and customers of the value of table time in hospitality venues will become increasingly important. Operators will have to focus more intently on the sales per seat hour/minute they are generating, and diners will have to understand that to commandeer a table for a certain length of time might require greater spending.?

Such situations can be very delicate to negotiate. This is already becoming apparent in the coffee bar space. Cajoling laptop-wielding customers to buy another coffee is becoming increasingly important to café owners, who must leverage value from their tables in today’s challenging environment. Starbucks is currently fighting its corner as it reverses a previous arrangement where people could linger in its venues without spending any money whatsoever.

The rising costs associated with running hospitality venues is changing the rules of the game, and everybody will have to acclimatise to the fact that in all parts of the food chain, time is (increasingly more) money.?

Glynn Davis, editor of Retail Insider

This piece was originally published on?Propel Info?where Glynn Davis writes a regular Friday opinion piece. Retail Insider would like to thank Propel for allowing the reproduction of this column.